


I love you because I know no other way than this

by kriswithakay



Category: Good Omens (TV), Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Genre: Alcohol, Cuddling & Snuggling, First Kiss, Fluff, Happy Ending, Hugs, M/M, Making Out, Mutual Pining, Neck Kissing, Scene: The Bookshop Fire (Good Omens), Tenderness, at what point does it stop being a hug and start being vertical cuddling, mentions of potential angst, they get so drunk they forget to angst, would be G but for brief mention of Efforts
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-04
Updated: 2019-11-04
Packaged: 2021-01-23 01:16:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,386
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21311728
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kriswithakay/pseuds/kriswithakay
Summary: There were a few times over the millennia when Aziraphale and Crowley got so spectacularly drunk that they forgot all the reasons they couldn't love each other.
Relationships: Aziraphale & Crowley (Good Omens), Aziraphale/Crowley (Good Omens)
Comments: 10
Kudos: 221





	I love you because I know no other way than this

**Author's Note:**

> Title from Pablo Neruda's Sonnet XVII.

For all the precautions taken over the millennia, for all the carefully constructed deniability of their Arrangement and their friendship, there were a few times when the wine (or beer, or scotch, or vodka) flowed in volumes that would easily kill any mortal entity, and Aziraphale and Crowley forgot themselves. Or forgot to care. Both, neither. Drinks were poured, and drained, and poured again. And when it got to be the darkest hours of the night, when all was still and silent (except for whatever marvelous human things happened out in the world even when all really was intended to be silent), in whatever little room they sequestered in to drink into oblivion, they came together like two magnets that had been drawn together over a long distance, slowly and inexorably, finally clicking into place and stilling.

It happened the first time in Rome. A couple hundred years after the time with the oysters, in a small tavern on the road between a blessing and a tempting. Crowley had removed his glasses hours ago, and the truly obscene amounts of drink the two had imbibed had left his eyes fully serpentine, yellow from corner to corner and positively twinkling with delight as the angel gesticulated and rambled about . . . something, or other. Crowley was having trouble keeping up with speech at the moment. Though he loved to listen to Aziraphale talk even if he couldn’t understand him. Oh, and the gesticulation, he had always loved that too. Aziraphale was so self-conscious all the time, always on the lookout for heavenly eyes watching him, or for some accidental faux pas, like forgetting to breathe or responding to thoughts that hadn’t been voiced, to alert the humans around him that he was not quite what he said he was. But when he was this level of spectacularly smashing drunk, he lost all inhibitions. Crowley, though still uncertain of the meaning of the words Aziraphale was using, was vaguely aware that he was mashing together several languages, switching between them at random to better articulate his point. More than one of the tongues he spoke had been dead for centuries, and once in a while a few Enochian words would work their way in. Crowley could understand those, even in his inebriated state. For beings such as the two of them, and a language such as that, he would always understand.

It happened then, when Aziraphale tripped up over trying to explain something in Aramaic and hiccupped his way through one of the seventeen different ways to pronounce ‘beetle’ in Enochian. Crowley rose from his seat, swayed (slithered?) across the little room, and plopped down onto the bed next to the angel. He snuggled in close, wiggling his hips to get comfortable in a way not fully possible for humans. Aziraphale didn’t pause, simply lifted an arm to tuck around Crowley’s shoulders, pulling him back until they both lay propped up on the rather meager pillow at the head of the bed. Crowley watched Aziraphale’s face up close as he talked for a moment, then raised a hand and fitted it against the line of Aziraphale’s jaw. Aziraphale trailed off in his speech, turning towards Crowley, curiosity in his eyes and a small smile on his lips.

Crowley kissed him.

Aziraphale kissed him back.

If this had happened a few hours earlier in the night, when the both of them were less drunk, it would have gone very differently. There would have been a lot of shouting, a few curses, one of them would have stormed out of the tavern, and they likely wouldn’t have spoken for a couple hundred years until they could gain enough distance to safely pretend it had never happened.

But it was the darkest hour of the night, and they were both so drunk that they forgot who they were, and all the reasons that might have been shouted back and forth as to why they couldn’t do this.

Crowley kissed Aziraphale, and rubbed his thumb over his jaw slowly. Aziraphale kissed him back, and wrapped both arms around him and leaned in closer, closer, until his nose was smashed against Crowley’s cheek. Then they broke apart giggling, and Crowley laid his head on Aziraphale’s shoulder and curved his hand around Aziraphale’s neck and promptly went to sleep. Aziraphale, not one for sleeping but also hating to be left out, gamely dozed on and off for a few hours.

The next morning they woke to the sun piercing through the window they had forgotten to close, and separated without a word, both grimacing and groaning as they took care of the after effects of such overindulgence. Nothing was spoken of what had happened, nor of how they woke. If it had happened differently, both of them might have fretted over half remembered actions in the dead of night, and what it had meant, and what it could mean. But neither of them did. In much the same way that a person asleep can dream of bizarre and impossible things, and never realize that any of it is out of the ordinary until they wake up, Aziraphale and Crowley had stumbled onto something that felt so _right_, so _logical_ and _normal_, that neither of them thought anything of it. Not when it happened, and not after. It was the way things should be, after all, for Crowley to wake up with his face pressed into Aziraphale’s neck, the angel’s scent warming and cloaking him; for Aziraphale to lay for hours with his nose in Crowley’s hair, feeling the weight of him pressed against his body. It was the way things were (should be).

They parted at the tavern, back on the road to a tempting and a blessing, and that night was not brought up again. It was hardly remembered, and barely thought of. If it had been, one or both of them may have worried about it. But they never did, and as a sleeper never realizes that what they dream of is impossible until the morning, Aziraphale and Crowley would not realize how momentous that night had been for a very, very long time.

* * *

It happened the second time in England, over a thousand years later. By then there had been plenty more nights of drinking, plenty of arguments and fierce philosophical discussions, plenty of time apart and fleeting times together. And all of these times only strengthened that _rightness_, that _normalcy_ they each felt and they each overlooked in the other’s presence. For them to be together was Right. It may not have been Good, but that didn’t matter for one of them, and the other was coming around to the problems of ultimate moral Good in his own time.

It was a wet night, as is often the case in that part of England. Not especially rainy or gloomy, only drizzling enough to leave you damp, and with an oppressive mugginess that makes you sweat under your clothes. The corner room of a little inn (run by a pious man with a penchant for pranks on his neighbors that were just on the wrong side of wrathful) was currently occupied by two storming drunk ethereal (and occult) beings. Neither of them were talking this time, both being a little miserable and sticky, and there was a very large amount of alcohol still left to be drunk. Their corporations were gamely trying to keep up, and since it never occurred to either being that such volumes of alcohol might reasonably kill a human, their corporations wouldn’t dare cease to function. But Crowley was considering the benefits of a nap, and Aziraphale’s eyes were going a bit fuzzy in a way that made it difficult to read the copy of Lady Murasaki’s work that he had open in front of him. He considered complaining about it to Crowley, raised his eyes to look at the demon, and lost his train of thought. Crowley was sprawled on his chair in a way that could generously be described as sitting, fondling his glass of whisky in an absent-mindedly obscene way that had been carefully cultivated over the centuries to flare up indignation and imagination in any nearby susceptible humans.

Seeming to sense the angel’s gaze, Crowley looked up. The smile he gave on meeting Aziraphale’s eyes was lopsided and clearly intoxicated, and Aziraphale smiled back in just the same way. Then Aziraphale rose from his chair, took a step forward to grab Crowley’s hands and pull him up as well, and embraced him.

Crowley _melted_, pressing forward until their bodies touched from their chests down to their knees, worming his hands inside Aziraphale’s coat and pressing into his back. Aziraphale burrowed in even closer until their bodies dove-tailed together like two puzzle pieces, soft belly to skinny stomach, plush roundness to sharp hips. Crowley was half-hard and Aziraphale was more than that, but neither of them moved to address it. There was no urgency to their embrace, no desperate need that required an outlet. All of that had been washed away in a flood of very fine whisky, and now they stood wrapped up in each other, on a muggy English night, swaying slightly to music that couldn’t be heard and neither would be able to dance to anyway.

After quite a long time, when the moon had moved noticeably in the sky above the inn, Crowley pulled back only far enough to kiss Aziraphale gently. This, too, continued for a while, until Aziraphale nosed his way down Crowley’s jaw and set his lips on Crowley’s neck, and Crowley responded with a noise much more like a cat than a snake. 

The sun rose not long after they had moved to the narrow, creaky bed and arranged themselves with Crowley leaning back into Aziraphale’s sturdy chest, head pillowed on his breast and hand shoved up under his shirt to rest on the lovely rolls of his side, and Aziraphale trailing his fingers up Crowley’s spine, trying to count the vertebrae and losing track every time Crowley shivered. They didn’t part or sober until the innkeeper’s son pounded on their door, asking if the two lords would like sausage for breakfast.

No words were spoken about that night that spilled dangerously into the morning. Few words were thought on it, and its significance would not be recognized for a long time yet.

* * *

It happened a third time, and a fourth. They were stolen moments, in the way that a once colonized country reclaiming its artifacts from the museums of conquerors is stealing. They were infrequent, mostly because the quantity of liquor it took for them to reach a state where it was possible for it to happen was rather hard to come by, and had a danger of making discerning humans suspicious when it goes missing.

It happened a fifth time after a thermos containing a bio-weapon was handed over in a car, and before a time-bomb in a bassinet was handed over in a graveyard. They were at Aziraphale’s bookshop, in the backroom, propped against each other on the worn sofa, giggling over some shared recollection. Every time one of them began to collect themselves, they would look at the other and start all over again. They were pressed together, side to side, though for the first time on one of these stolen (reclaimed) nights, there was a thread of anxiety in the air. One of them was dangerously close to waking up and realizing that the dream they just had was strange and impossible. One of them was almost afraid, uncertain awareness like an ant crawling up your leg at an otherwise beatific picnic.

And then Crowley, still giggling, pressed his lips to Aziraphale’s cheek with a loud smack, and Aziraphale brushed off the ant and returned the gesture, making sure it was comically loud in the space of the backroom. This set them both giggling even harder, leaning together even closer, and when the sun rose the next morning it didn’t occur to either of them that what they have done for the fifth time was important. It would not occur to them for another few decades. They’re getting there.

* * *

The bookshop was burning, and that magnetic-north of normalcy, that unshakeable core of _this is right, this is how it should be_, that had existed for so long he had never even noticed it, has been shattered into pieces. Crowley was adrift, shaken and shaking, his fingers barely able to grip the charred remains of Agnes Nutters’ nice and accurate prophecies. He didn’t know where to look, where to turn, lost at sea with no compass to guide him. So he did what had worked five times before: he went to find a drink, and hoped that if he drank enough then the world would become Right again.

* * *

It happens for the last time after they toast at the Ritz, after they return home to a returned bookshop, after they decide to check the quality of all the restored wine in the cellar. It happens for the last time, as they curl together on the worn sofa, and Crowley holds Aziraphale’s face in his hands, strokes his thumbs over wet cheeks and whispers. Words are so rarely needed in these reclaimed moments, when so much is understood without them. Words are needed now.

_I thought I lost you. I thought I lost this. _

_I will always come back to you._

It happens for the last time, because when the sun rises the next morning to them curled together on the worn sofa, they do not separate. They grimace and groan as they take care of the aftereffects of such over indulgence, and they reach for each other again. It happens for the last time, because the shroud of darkness and intoxication are no longer needed.

This time when they kiss, in the full light of day and with a yearning as old as the earth finally fulfilled, the very ground beneath them shivers. This time it is momentous, and significant, and _Right_. This time when they click into place like magnets and dove-tail like two puzzle pieces, they understand all of it. The light of the next day of the rest of their lives spills over them, and they know that this is Right.


End file.
